The only time I ever saw my father cry was when his brother
died. He was sitting on the edge of his king-size bed in the master bedroom,
the huge room at the back of our California ranch-style house with a door that
led out to the backyard, where lemon and orange and grapefruit trees grew, and
a giant oak tree surrounded by tulips which towered over our suburban empire,
branches reaching upward and outward like beneficent arms stippled with round,
rotten oakballs, which I thought in my youth were natural products like acorns,
not signs of disease.
I’d strolled in to the forbidden sanctuary to ask a
question—could I borrow the car or get an advance on my allowance—but stopped
short when I saw Dad sitting lifeless, arms hanging limply at his side, face
dripping downwards like a Dali painting towards the threadbare quilted
bedspread, blue eyes muddled in tears.
He wore one of his standard short-sleeve white nylon shirts,
thin and loose to keep him cool in the Stockton summer. His polyester pants
were dark blue, cinched under his pot belly with a faux-leather belt. His puffy
feet were bare. He was almost bald at 52, his pink pate showing beneath a few
slivers of hair. There must have been a glass somewhere, filled with ice and
clear liquid, but I didn’t see it. There was always a glass.
“What’s the matter?” I asked with alarm. “What’s happened,
Daddy?”
He didn’t answer, so I sat down gingerly beside him, placed
a tentative hand over his and prodded gently, “What’s wrong?”
What was wrong was that Angus, my alcoholic uncle, the
little brother my father had been trying to salvage for most of his life, was
dead. Dad hadn’t succeeded in saving him. Jack Daniels had won.
Even when they were teens, even before they both joined the army
during WWII, Angus drank too much and Dad covered for him—lying to their
parents, making excuses to the girls they took out to the levee on double dates,
driving the car home, and helping his little brother up the stairs, into bed.
After the war, when Grandpa decreed they would all become
optometrists—my grandfather and his two sons practicing together in the same
office on Main Street—the shielding continued. Dad took Angus’s patients when
he called in hungover, rearranged the work schedule so Angus could sleep it
off.
Angus was tall and rangy and red-haired, with deeply grooved
flesh that hung loose on his face, an upper lip that sometimes curled back to
expose his canines, and a gruff voice with a sharp splash of bile that he tried
to present as humor. He ruled his home like a mad king, lording over his pretty
blonde wife and sullen, neglected children, striking his dogs. I thought he was
scary. I kept a wide berth.
But my father saw someone different. Perhaps he remembered a
silky baby brought home from the hospital in a swaddling blanket, or a small child
stumbling behind him down to the delta to plunge a fleshy hand in the silty
mud, grabbing for pollywogs.
Family loyalty was part of it. Dad believed in that. He’d
often told me about the Scottish clans in their kilts and how they stuck
together—that bonds of blood superceded duty to God or the law—and I could
picture Dad and Angus as boys, plotting exploits high in a tree house, or as
young men lounging on the benchseat of their silver Studebaker, making plans.
So they grew, and they worked, and raised families, and each
year they became just a little more distant, as each year Angus slipped a little
bit deeper down his damp hole.
Then Dad invested some money for Grandpa and made a small
fortune. And Grandpa set up trust funds for the grandchildren—to send us all to
college—and put some aside to take care of Angus and his family, should the
need arise. They could see the need arising.
Dad was put in charge of disbursements. And then Angus was divorced,
unemployed, living alone in a squalid apartment, with a long line of credit at
the corner liquor store and a heart full of hate for his older brother—the man
who held the pursestrings, shut.
Dad tried to manage the money to preserve Angus’ health,
paying for the necessities, but not enough to finance a bender. But Angus
taught his children that my father was cheating them, keeping their rightful
inheritance for himself, and one of them even carried Angus’ banner to court,
where the judge found the opposite to be true: Dad’s investments had further enriched
us all.
That pissed Daddy off, being sued by his nephew. But it
didn’t make him cry. Nothing did. Not his father’s death. Not his wife’s
cancer. Not his failure to amass a fortune in the stock market, the dream that
had inspired his early retirement from optometry. Not even his commitment to a
mental hospital one summer in Santa Cruz. Nothing made him cry. Nothing hurt
that much. Only Angus. Only Angus had the power to produce those pearlescent tears.
Angus, who would ask Dad for more money for more golden nectar. Angus, whom my
father would refuse.
Dad looked up at me helplessly, like a befuddled child. What was I supposed to do? I moved
closer and put my arm around his shoulders, offered what comfort I could. But I
had no answer. And when I left the bedroom he was still sitting and staring off
at a much different brother—a brother who loved him, a brother who was always
outside Daddy’s reach.
In Greek mythology, the Bible too, there are stories of cursed
families like the House of Atreus. Their troubles started with Tantalus, the
half-mortal son of Zeus who fed human flesh to the gods, and extended to his great,
great grandson Orestes who committed the worst crime of all. Bound by law and
custom to avenge his father’s murder, he killed the murderer—his mom.
Modern people don’t see their problems as family curses,
preferring to believe in the magic of genetics, or psychology, or the
environment in which they were raised. Is it Nature or Nurture? they wonder. But
I know it’s neither, because the curse on my own house is so apparent. Alcoholism
weaves its wet way through our descendants. And mental illness snakes through
me to my damaged daughter, along with the curse of disbursement. Like Daddy’s dilemna
with Angus, my daughter wants money to feed her demon; I hold back.
I am sitting in the passenger seat while my husband drives us
through the Santa Cruz mountains when the words “blocked number” show on my
cell phone screen.
“Hello?” I answer tentatively.
“MOM!” She is drunk on anger already, calling from the hospital.
“Where do you want me to live?”
The redwoods lining Highway 17 are straight and tall. Their
bark is deeply grooved, the color of cinnamon. They are the tallest living
things on the planet—longer even than blue whales—and they only grow here, in
the Northwest U.S., and a few small pockets of China. I stare out of the window
at their rough skin.
“Can you call me back in five minutes? I’m in the middle of
something.”
“Okay.” She sounds relieved to hang up. We both are. We need
time to gird for the familiar battle.
“She wants me to help her find a place to live,” I tell
Stanley.
“Don’t do it!” He is drunk on disappointment. We’ve been
arguing over this daughter for 10 years--more. “She’s 25 years old. She has to
learn to take care of herself.”
“But she’s not well…”
Stanley’s fingers tighten on the steering wheel. He stares
straight ahead as he navigates the twisting highway. There are hard, shiny cars
hemming us in on all sides, speeding aggressively towards the summit. A
mountain shoots up to the left of us, a cliff drops off to the right.
“She’s never going to improve if you don’t stop enabling
her.” It used to upset me—being blamed for Stella’s problems. Now I feel
defeated. This is her 13th hospitalization in seven years.
I remember a scene from Euripedes. Clytemnestra pleads with her
son Orestes for her life: Stop, my son.
Look—my breast. Your heavy head dropped on it and you slept, oh, many a time.
Your baby mouth, where never a tooth was, sucked the milk, and so you grew…
“What are you afraid is going to happen if you follow my
fucking advice, for once in your life?” Stanley barks.
“She’ll be hurt; she’ll feel abandoned. She could commit
suicide—that’s a symptom of mental illness.” My voice is shrill.
“She’s never shown any inclination to do that.”
The sun barely penetrates through the redwood forest. All
six lines of curving highway are in shade. The car is cold. I clatter my
knuckles against the window.
“She might get mad and disappear—never call us again.” Now
my voice is wavery—an old crone begging on the side of the road, gnarled hand thrust
out.
“She’s never shown any sign of that either!” Stanley is
exasperated with his stupid, stupid wife. “She’ll call when she wants
something. She has to call when she
wants money because you still get her disability payments.”
“I don’t know if it’s reasonable
to expect her to find a place to live on her own. What if she can’t do it?” I
turn toward him. The elevation isn’t much here—1700 feet—but I can’t breathe.
“She’s never going
to progress unless she learns some responsibility and humility. She hasn’t got
a shred of either one. She thinks she’s a fucking rock star—that she can do
whatever she pleases, and you’ll clean up the mess!”
The phone rings again as we drive by the site of the old Santa’s Village, a place I loved to
visit as a child. Dad would pull over on our way to vacation in Santa Cruz, and
we would buy fresh gingerbread from a log cabin with simulated snow on the
scalloped roof. Now it’s a medical marijuana collective.
“MOM! What did you decide? Where do you want me to live?”
“I don’t know, Stella. It’s your life. You need to figure it
out.” Stanley nods at me with exaggerated enthusiasm and waves a thumbs-up sign
in my face. I turn to look at the trees.
“How am I supposed to do THAT from the hospital?”
“I don’t know. Ask them to help you. You have $875 a month
in disability payments. Tell them that’s your budget.”
“MOM!” Stella chants, the Greek chorus. “That’s not going to
work! People want first and last, and a deposit. I need $2,000 to start my life
over!”
“You haven’t got $2,000.”
“What about my back pay? What happened to that?”
“Your back pay? That was two years ago, Stella. You
spent it.”
“You shouldn’t have given it to me!”
“I don’t know what to say...”
“MOM! If you don’t HELP me, they’re going to release me to a
HOMELESS shelter, because that’s what YOU want—that’s where YOU want me to
live!”
I want to say, That’s not true. I wanted you to live in the
last place I found you. But you preferred to take street drugs and change up
your meds; and start a war with your landlord; and overdraw your bank account
to buy an ipad so you could leave it in the park; and torment your new
boyfriend until he moved back to Virginia; and alienate everyone you know who
could help you; and spend a month bouncing from Berkeley, to Fremont, to
Olympia, Washington before finally checking yourself into a hospital back home.
“Can’t they find you
some low-income housing?”
“No, MOM,” she spits out my name like a curse word. “They
can’t.” I catch a glimpse of Orestes’ sword.
“And, Mom?” she asks as we crest the Loma Prieta summit.
“Yes?”
“The NEXT time you want to call me—DON’T. The next time you
want to call me just SHUT THE FUCK UP.”
“Okay.” I picture the drink Daddy had beside his bed that afternoon,
hear the bright, percussive “clink, clink” of the ice cubes as they drop into
the glass.
Stella hangs up. Stanley drives on. And the car lifts
slightly as we start down into the Santa Clara Valley, nosing our way into the phalanx
of hard, shiny cars that spreads over the parched, brown landscape like the metal
wing of some giant, fantastical bird.
